Self Evaluation - Showcase December 2013

During our decision on what to do for our duo we looked at many different musicals. We started of by concentrating on Hairspray, we started by talking about and looking at clips from the musical. we then went on to try and create some choreography, However, we found this hard because neither of us felt like it was the right thing to be doing as neither of us were particularly confident with the theme. We decided we should stick with the theme of Musicals but chose one that we both felt more confident with.

We Chose to go with the theme the Lion King for because it is a musical we are both extremely familiar with. I felt this responded to the stimuli of 'Era's of Dance' because it is such a well known children's story and children and parents would both automatically know what it is. As well as being a children's book and film it is also a musical.

We used the musical music as we felt whilst still showing it was the story we were showing it was still a mature performance. The musical of Lion King began in the year 1997 but the film came out in 1994. This is a Disney film meaning the majority of children will see it in early childhood and up. This means that our audience will understand the reason why we have chosen it which is to represent a childhood story through dance. We Used African dance during the piece, African dance started in the 1930's which although is not close to when the musical is released shows the cultural dance of the country the Lion king is set in.

During our choreography we used both a Narrative and Rondo structure due to the way we acted out the story whilst also dancing to the music, we also repeated and developed our motifs. We chose the song 'Just cant wait to be king' this is because we felt we would be able to act out what was being said in the song whilst taking on a character in the dance. We each took on a character and acted as we thought they would but using dance. We also had a climax, this is because we used dynamic variation of movement. We simply went from telling to story to doing a dance piece to the same music. We used Repetition of some moves, these were mainly the African moves we chose to put in to show the link between where the Lion King is set and Dance used in that country. We also used Cannon during the Climax to increase technique showed in the dance. We used gestures such as pointing to increase to knowledge of the fact we were acting out what the different characters where saying.

We faced a serious low point during choreography when Keleeigh was unable to dance after badly injuring her knee, However we did not let this faze us and continued with choreographing our piece whilst she was doing as much as she could whilst sitting in a chair. We even made plans to perform with her being pushed in a wheelchair if we had to. We proved we had the strength to work through problems and finish our piece to the best of our ability's. We were also able to make choreography quickly using teamwork and getting feedback from class mates.

We developed our choreography by using different dance styles and dynamics to go with different tempos of the music. We did this by incorporating African dance into the chorus of the music and adding jazz to form a climax using technique such as jumps turns and kicks learnt in previous lessons. Our motif was simply to get the story being told across to the audience in a new way, in this case, using dance, We developed this by using the different techniques and styles. By changing style with the different tempos we demonstrated how we were responding to the music's stimuli and making it work well within our piece. We explored many structures for our dance but as I mentioned earlier we decided to stick to narrative to support our idea of telling the story. Our floor patterns varied due to the character we had taken on. Keeleigh used a lot more of the floor space in her pathways to show that she is the younger more energetic character whilst I whilst still using the space didn't use quite as much to show I was the older wiser character who may not have had the same amount of energy to be running around with. We also showed the characters by imitating the voices on the tracks using our bodies to form actions to match what was being said.  

We were given feed back by class mates to tell us what may need improving and what they felt was good. This gave us a good idea of what the audience would understand and what needed to be made clearer. During rehearsals we got more and more comfortable performing in front of people and could begin to put more performance into our dance as we knew it would be taken in the right way. We learnt that the harder we worked the better the response we got was, this shows improvements in work ethics and we learnt that the more energy put into the dance along with characterisation the better it was understood.

Even though our final performance was not in the show we still went full out in the performance and added as much emotion and characterisation as we could. We got a good reaction from class mates and they told us that we had improved a lot since the first time they saw it and that they fully understood the story being told and why we were doing it like that. They liked the fact that it was different from the other dances as everyone else's was based in an era whilst ours was based on a memory of a film not only in an era but one that uses a unusual style of dance such as African. I still feel as if we could have improved the first part of the dance because it started off a bit shaky but energy picked up from there. 

We applied contrasting dynamics such as using clean moves showing fluidity such as the turns as well as using strong fast moves such as the jumps and kicks. We used performance and interpretive skills when showing characterisation and showing we can use the floor space well. We showed showed focus by staying in character and dancing along to what was being said. I feel we also used projection during our climax as it was fast and sharp which is a complete contrast to the slow fluent moves shown before that point in the dance. 

As i mentioned earlier our choreography changed completely compared to what was written on the dance planner due to us not feeling like we could connect to the project, I feel that being able to connect with the project is very important otherwise your overall performance wont be very good as you will only be acting and wont actually feel like the part and this is sometimes very obvious to an audience. 

In future projects I am going to make sure I find a theme I feel is suitable right from the very start to avoid any unneeded complications such as having to change the musical as we had to do. I feel we did well but we could have made the choreography more complicated and more impressive for the audience to enjoy more. I am glad we continued to work even when Keeleigh could not dance as i feel if we hadn't our dance would not have been able to progress as much as it did and it would not have been professional to stop just because one person in the team was unable to dance. I feel we could have concentrated on the story telling choreography more and made that as good as the climax. 

Any extra information was found at en.wikipedia.org/‎.